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Sedna’s gravity could tell they were in trouble far before her eyes did.
The void around them had no pull. No solar wind, no tidal pressure from anything large enough to register, no fading trace of Sol’s influence. Not even the ghost of it she’d feel at her post on the Oort Cloud’s edge. Just the flat, neutral pressure of empty space pushing against her skin, and the gravitational signatures of eight other dwarf planets she’d spent less than one Earthling month getting to know.
Four of those eight were hers. Orcus, gray and watchful at the edge of her awareness; Quaoar, wheat stalk working between his teeth and amusement radiating off him like low-level heat; Gonggong, red-haired and gap-toothed and broadcasting his emotions through gravity instead of his face. She could pick them apart without looking.
The other four she was still learning to tell apart by gravity alone, and it bothered her more than she’d expected, because Sedna liked knowing things and these four were still strangers. Pluto pulled heavier than his size should have allowed, Charon’s signature so tightly wound into his that isolating one from the other felt like trying to hear a single instrument inside a chord. Eris registered cool and far, always a fraction more distant than the cluster required. Makemake was easy; his gravity fidgeted, same as the rest of him, pencil-tapping and question-asking and never quite sitting still. Haumea was the one she kept losing. His spin threw off her readings, and every time she thought she’d mapped his rhythm it wobbled into something new.
“Did anyone catch which direction he went?” Quaoar shifted his wheat stalk from one side of his mouth to the other, turning in a circle that looked lazy and wasn’t. His sheepskin-lined jacket hung open even here, in the dead cold between stars, because Quaoar had never once conceded anything to the environment he lived in. “Because I want it noted that I told Orcus this would happen. I told him. Two separate times.”
“You told me once.” Orcus didn’t look at him. Arms folded, coat buttoned to the collar, gray eyes fixed on the empty space Wise had been occupying three Earthling minutes ago. “And you said it ‘seemed suspicious.’ That’s not a warning.”
“It is absolutely—”
“Quiet.”
Sedna didn’t raise her voice. She never needed to. Quaoar’s mouth closed and Orcus turned to face her and Gonggong drifted half a rotation to her left, spiky brick-red hair catching no light at all, letting out a low “Gong” that she felt in her gravity field before she heard it. Her people. Her three. Sedna’s hand went to her braid without thinking, tightening the pin at her crown. They knew when she needed the space to think.
The other five took longer.
Eris glanced at Pluto from under her hood, her pale eyes catching nothing (because there was nothing to catch, the interstellar medium around them dark and empty). Makemake looked up from the notepad he’d already pulled out, pencil frozen mid-scratch. Haumea kept spinning, chin sunk beneath the collar of his thick jacket. Pluto’s hand found Charon’s arm (or hers found his, considering their tidal lock closed the gap before either of them seemed to consciously reach), and Sedna watched the gesture happen and felt a specific, stupid ache in her core that she pushed under and kept moving past.
(She always pushed it under. She was very good at it.)
They went quiet too, eventually.
Sedna scanned the stars and knew that all of them were wrong. Not the stars themselves, but their positions relative to each other, the angles between them, the relative brightnesses she’d spent millennia memorizing from the Oort Cloud during her long, solitary orbits. She knew what Sol looked like from eight hundred AU. She knew the way it dimmed at a thousand, became just another yellow dot by fifteen hundred, indistinguishable from any other G-type unless you’d been staring at it for your entire existence. She could pick the Sun out of a crowd of ten thousand stars at her aphelion, half-asleep.
None of the stars around them matched anything she recognized.
Wise had spiraled them through FTL transit until Gonggong’s route measurements were useless, then dropped them in a stretch of interstellar space Sedna had never seen before. She’d been right about him from the beginning, from the moment she’d watched him whispering with SIMP at the Kingdom’s threshold and felt her suspicion settle into certainty. She’d tracked the route. She’d assigned Gonggong to count. She’d prepared for exactly this. And Wise had prepared for her preparation.
Stars, that was smart. She hated that it was smart.
“We’re not in the Oort Cloud,” she said.
They likely weren’t anywhere near it.
Pluto drifted closer. Charon came with him the way she always did, never more than a body-width away, rotating in their quiet binary rhythm together. Sedna had been watching them do this for weeks now and kept waiting for the observation to stop producing that pull in her core. It hadn’t. Pluto’s hazel eyes were darker than they should have been; the Kingdom’s mark. Every rogue who spent too long without sunlight lost color. She’d noticed it creeping into her sentinels’ irises too.
“How far out are we?” His accent thickened, the drawl going so thick she could have mapped it. Whatever was underneath, he was trying to keep it there. He wasn’t succeeding. (Pluto hid things the way an asteroid hid behind a comet’s tail; technically possible, practically see-through.)
“I don’t know yet.” She didn’t like saying that. “Wise scrambled Gonggong’s measurements, and I can’t orient.”
“Gong,” Gonggong confirmed, his gap-toothed grimace doing the work his vocabulary couldn’t.
“Then we’re lost.” Eris. Hood up, arms crossed. “We’re lost, and the planets are about to get scattered across the galaxy, and we’re floating here.”
Nobody answered. In the quiet, Quaoar’s wheat stalk started working faster and Makemake’s pencil tapped against his notepad and Haumea’s spin picked up speed. Sedna’s people on one side, Pluto’s on the other.
Pluto was the one who broke it. “Now what, guys?” His voice cracked on the second word, the Southern drawl gone thick, whatever he’d been performing dropped clean out of it. He looked around at all nine of them with those wide, dimming hazel eyes. “I mean—we gotta do somethin’, right?”
Sedna had watched him do this at the Kingdom, back when he’d tried to reason with Wise, tried to make the case for trust even after Sedna had warned him there was nothing to trust. It was generous. It was also, right now, not going to get them home.
“We find the Sun,” Sedna said.
Her sentinels knew that tone. On the other side of the invisible line, Pluto blinked. Makemake pushed his glasses up his nose.
“Sure.” Quaoar’s drawl was pitched for the metaphorical room around them. “Let me just pull up the coordinates I definitely have. Oh wait—those are destroyed.” He glanced sideways at Gonggong. “What were the final numbers?”
“Gong gong gong.” Gonggong shook his head.
“Exactly.”
Makemake’s pencil stopped. “Wait—what measurements? You were measuring the route? During FTL? How did you—”
“We tracked angle and speed on the way in, and Gonggong counted time.” Sedna cut him off. She’d done it every time he’d started one of his question barrages since they met (the first time she’d met him at the Kingdom’s gates, she’d had to repeat herself “like twenty times,” per his own sheepish count). She still hadn’t figured out a way to cut him off that didn’t make him look like a kicked puppy, all wide pink eyes and slipping glasses and chalk-smudged hurt. “Wise wrecked all of it.”
“Ooh.” He chirped it, the kicked-puppy look gone, replaced by fascination, his pencil moving again, his whole body leaning forward like the destruction of their only navigational dataset was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all week. “That’s smart. Counting in Gong during faster-than-light transit to preserve—”
“Makemake.” Eris’s voice cut through, stripped of everything but the consonants. His mouth closed. She didn’t look at him; just said his name, and it worked.
“I need to find Sol,” she said. “Give me time.”
Time turned out to mean more than she was comfortable with.
She spent the first several Earthling hours rotating in place, mapping every star she could see against the charts she’d memorized from her aphelion. Brightness, color, position relative to the galactic plane. She’d done this kind of work for millennia at her post, alone, with nothing but icy Oort Cloud fragments for company and the fading yellow point of Sol for orientation, and none of the results matched yet. This was what she was good at. Eleven thousand years per orbit with no one to distract her, and she’d memorized the sky.
(Useful because alone. That was the equation, and she’d made peace with it a long time ago, or she’d told herself she had.)
The two groups drifted apart. They always did, whenever they stopped moving. Sentinels to one side, Pluto’s people to the other. Orcus and Quaoar settled at the edge of Sedna’s cluster, Orcus buttoned and watchful, Quaoar with his wheat stalk working and one eye on Gonggong. Across the gap, Pluto rested with Charon in their locked rotation. Charon’s white-and-brown hair bounced every time she turned to check on someone, and she never stopped checking; Sedna had noticed this about her early on. It looked effortless. It wasn’t.
(Or she hadn’t used to.)
Haumea spun at the edge of Pluto’s group, buttoned all the way up in his soft cream layers, white eyes on Sedna. Eris drifted between the two clusters, hood up.
The breach came from the direction Sedna expected.
She heard Makemake before she saw him, pencil scratching, glasses sliding, the rustle of that perpetually chalk-smudged puffy vest. He drifted across the gap with the subtlety of an asteroid on a collision course and stopped in front of Gonggong, and the brightness of his “Hey!” was so complete, so unguarded, that Gonggong’s head came up and the gap-toothed grin appeared for the first time since Wise had dumped them.
“Okay—the counting thing.” Makemake settled cross-legged in zero gravity, notepad balanced on one knee, pencil poised. “I have questions. What unit were you using? Fixed interval or relative? Does the Gong language have numerical—”
“Gong gong,” Gonggong offered.
Makemake’s whole body jolted. His glasses slid fully off the bridge of his nose. “Was that—was that two? Is ‘gong gong’ two?”
Quaoar studied him for a moment, the disheveled red hair, the chalk-smudged sweater, the notepad already covered in scribbled calculations, and the wheat stalk shifted to the other side of his mouth. His dark gray eyes were doing a reassessment Sedna hadn’t expected. “You want to learn Gong?”
“I want to learn everything.”
Quaoar glanced at Gonggong. Half a grin. It had taken the sentinels months to learn Gonggong’s inflections. Makemake was asking for the lesson.
“Pull up a rock,” Quaoar said, gesturing at the empty around them. “Figuratively.”
Gonggong drifted closer, careful and patient. He’d never had an audience outside his own unit and wasn’t entirely sure what to do with one. He began to count.
“Gong.”
“One,” Makemake whispered, writing.
“Gong gong.”
“Two.”
“Gong gong gong.”
“Three—oh, the stress falls on the last syllable for—”
“Gong.” Quaoar translated: “He says you’re overthinking it.”
(And stars above, he was right.)
But the corner of Quaoar’s mouth had gone soft, an expression Sedna had never seen on him in the field, and she watched it happen and felt her grip on Gonggong’s gravity tighten for a half-second before she caught herself and let go. Makemake was doing in a single Earthling hour what the sentinels had taken months to learn, cross-legged and delighted and showing no sign he knew he was the first person outside their unit to ever try.
She wasn’t sure if what she was feeling was gratitude or if it stung.
Both, probably.
She turned back to the stars.
Sirius saved them.
Too bright to miss even at distance, its white-dwarf companion creating a paired signature she recognized the instant she locked onto it. 8.6 light-years from Sol. She could start narrowing.
Her core pulsed, and she rotated until she found Procyon, 11.5 light-years from Sol, displaced below the ecliptic plane. Wise had spiraled them downward during transit, a disorientation tactic she would have caught if Gonggong’s counting hadn’t been scrambled. She could work with that.
She searched for Alpha Centauri and didn’t find it right away.
Her core went cold. She didn’t let it reach her face.
At this distance, the 4.37 light-years between Alpha Centauri and Sol would collapse to nearly nothing in her visual field. The two systems would look like one point, maybe two if she squinted, and she needed someone who’d seen Sol from closer in to help her separate them. She’d spent her existence watching the Sun from nine hundred AU. She knew what it looked like as a distant yellow speck that kept her company without keeping her warm. What she needed right now was someone who’d seen it from forty.
“Pluto.”
She caught herself on the name. She’d never asked any of them for anything. (Quaoar called this “Sedna’s law.” She hadn’t found that funny.)
But she needed him.
Pluto drifted over without hesitation. Charon followed at the precise lag their lock demanded, and the brightness on her face when someone asked her for something, any something, was so immediate that Sedna blinked.
“Hey!” Charon’s brown eyes went wide and warm. “What do you need?”
Sedna pointed at the field. “Stars. I’ve found Sirius and Procyon and I need Alpha Centauri. I know what Sol looks like from the far edge and you know what it looks like from the Belt. Help me.”
Pluto studied the sky while Charon tilted her head next to him, white-and-brown hair swinging. They scanned together, and Sedna watched the way they did it, Pluto searching with his whole body tilted toward the right quadrant before his eyes got there, while Charon eliminated wrong answers with quick sweeps. Sedna’s core ached for one bad second, watching two people do together what she had always done alone.
“There.” Pluto lifted one arm, pointing toward a cluster of yellow-orange stars. “Third from the left, that’s a G-type, and the two next to it are a binary—if that’s Alpha Centauri A and B—”
“Sol.”
Sedna locked onto it and her gravity stuttered so hard that Gonggong, ten meters away, went silent mid-gong.
It was dim. A yellow pinprick.
Sedna had never been warm. Fourteen Kelvin at best, even at her closest approach; the Sun was just a bright dot that kept her company without giving her heat. He’d probably never known she was there.
“I found it,” she said.
“Oh, stars—” Charon’s grip tightened on Pluto’s arm, her brown eyes going wide and wet. “You found it—”
“We found it,” Pluto corrected, glancing at Sedna, and the gratitude in his expression was too big for the gesture. Too generous. (She didn’t know what to do with generous.)
Sedna turned back to Sol before she had to figure out what her face was doing.
No one asked if she was certain.
“So we just go toward it.” Eris had her hood down. She was paying attention. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And the distance?”
“Gonggong.” Sedna turned to face him. “How long was the FTL leg getting here compared to the trip from the Solar System to the Kingdom?”
“Gong gong gong gong gong.”
Quaoar translated, wheat stalk shifting. “Way shorter. Maybe a quarter.”
“Then Wise didn’t take us far. He wanted to scramble our measurements, not exile us to the far side of the galaxy. He’s a Y-type brown dwarf, coldest spectral class, limited energy reserves. He wouldn’t have burned them on distance when all he needed was disorientation. If the FTL was a quarter of the original trip, we’re a fraction of the distance from the Solar System that the Kingdom is.”
“Then we might be within tens of light-years,” Makemake said, looking up from his notepad with his glasses catching the dim galactic light. “The Oort Cloud extends one and a half light-years from Sol in every direction, and if we’re inside twenty—”
“We’re close.”
“I need a new count,” Sedna told Gonggong. “Not the route. Track our speed as we move, and count at intervals. You’re our odometer.”
Gonggong paused. His gap-toothed expression shifted from grim to something more grounded. “Gong.”
“We should go.” Charon’s voice cut through, and the group went still. It was the first time she’d addressed all of them rather than just Pluto, and she wasn’t looking at the stars. She was looking at Eris with her hood down, at Haumea spinning faster, at Makemake’s pencil tapping. She’d read the room before Sedna had.
“While we still have the will,” Charon said.
“She’s right,” Pluto said, quieter now. “Let’s go.”
Sedna set the heading, and they moved.
───
Sedna kept Sol fixed at twelve o’clock and made corrections as the surrounding stars shifted with their motion. Gonggong counted (“Gong,” then a pause, “Gong gong,” then another, “Gong gong gong”) and the rhythm of it anchored her, the most reliable clock any of them carried. He’d been her timekeeper since the early days of the sentinel unit, back when Quaoar had first explained to her that the “Gong” variations weren’t noise but language, that Gonggong was counting and commenting and expressing himself through tonal shifts the rest of them needed to learn to hear. She’d learned. It had taken months. It had been worth it.
Somewhere behind her, the groups were mixing.
She could feel it in her gravity field, the two clusters dissolving at the edges. Makemake drifted out of Pluto’s cluster and into the sentinel formation without seeming to notice he’d crossed the gap, settling next to Gonggong with his notepad and counting along under his breath, asking Quaoar questions in a whispered rapid-fire that Quaoar answered with a laid-back ease that was, underneath all of it, kind of enjoying itself. She’d never seen Quaoar look like that with anyone outside the unit. The wheat stalk kept moving but his posture had shifted, the studied casualness easing into something less performed, and Sedna watched it happen and filed it away without naming it.
Charon followed. Not to Quaoar, but to Gonggong, sitting near him in silence for a while before she started testing his inflections with a stubborn, cheerful insistence that reminded Sedna of a body trying to learn a gravitational frequency by feel. Getting it wrong. Trying again. Getting it wrong. Trying again. Refusing to quit. Sedna had heard the stories during the weeks they’d traveled together, told in fragments between star-checks and Gonggong’s counts: Pluto’s lies about being a planet, the board game that had gone sideways, the fight that had nearly broken him and Charon apart. Ceres’s asteroids. The Moon Revolution.
“That one sounded worried,” she said to Gonggong after a particular gong. “Was that worried?”
“Gong.”
“Annoyed?”
“GONG.”
“That was a yes! I’m getting the hang of this.”
Gonggong’s gap-toothed grin came back, and Sedna noticed the way his shoulders dropped into something looser, some tension she hadn’t realized he’d been carrying because he’d been carrying it for so long it had looked like the shape of him. She’d known Gonggong longer than almost anyone. She’d assigned him tasks and trusted his counting and understood his speech. She had not, she realized, ever made him look like that. (And she’d had centuries to try.)
(And that stung. That one stung in a place she didn’t want to look at.)
Haumea drifted closer too, gravitating toward the sentinels’ side of things, and ended up near Orcus. He spun quietly for a while, his egg-shaped body wobbling in its 3.9-hour rotation the way it always did, the neatly buttoned cream layers doing their best to present an orderly exterior over the shape he couldn’t control. Then, in that stammering, nasally voice of his:
“I—is it always this cold? Where you’re from?”
Orcus glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Oh.” Haumea’s spinning wobbled once, then steadied. “I—I think I could get used to it. Maybe.”
Orcus looked at him for another moment, gray eyes assessing the way they always did. Then he turned back to the dark without comment. But he didn’t move away. And Sedna watched Haumea’s spinning settle into something calmer beside him.
Eris was the last to move. She drifted out of the no-man’s-land between the clusters and settled near Sedna without acknowledging that she’d done it. Hood up, arms crossed. They didn’t speak, and the not-speaking was comfortable.
They were alike in that way.
Eris could have cared about being the reason Pluto got demoted. She didn’t. Eris had mentioned it once, during one of the quiet stretches between stars, that she’d said to Pluto a long time ago that the dwarf planets were “just as good.” Sedna respected that. She also envied it.
“You’re staring.” Eris didn’t look at her when she said it.
Sedna looked away.
The first sign of real progress came when Alpha Centauri separated from Sol in her visual field. At great distances the two systems collapsed into a single point, and as the dwarf planets closed, the angular separation widened until she could distinguish three discrete stars: Alpha Centauri A and B in their binary orbit, and Sol, separate from them, distinct, hers.
“We’re inside twenty light-years,” she announced.
“¡Vámonos!” Makemake shouted, punching the air with his pencil, and the sheer volume of it in the cold, in the dark, in the middle of nothing, startled a laugh out of Charon, who startled one out of Pluto, who startled one out of Quaoar. That last one was a sound Sedna had never heard from Quaoar in the field, lower than she’d expected, caught between surprise and warmth, and the laughter rippled through the group’s gravity like a wave.
She didn’t laugh. But she didn’t stop it either, and the sound of it stayed with her longer than it should have.
They kept moving. The cold pressed in. The silence between Gonggong’s counts was the gravitational kind, nothing pulling on her except the other eight, their collective mass so negligible it wouldn’t have registered on an instrument but she could feel them when they drifted close, small warm pressures against her field.
She envied Pluto.
Less than an Earthling month, and she barely knew him. And she’d already caught herself watching him and Charon more than she should have, how they moved together without deciding to, Charon’s hand always finding Pluto’s arm. He looked used to having someone else’s gravity that close, comfortable with it in a way Sedna had never been with anyone. She was only good at this, this star-finding, this navigation, because she’d been alone. All her years at the edge of the Solar System with nothing to do but memorize the stars and patrol the border and occasionally meet with the other outer dwarf planets; that solitude was the only reason she could find Sol right now.
That was a fact, and she had lived with it for longer than most civilizations had existed, and it had never once bothered her before. She’d had her post. Her telescope. Her sentinels, who were a team, not a family, and the distinction had always mattered to her because teams you could command and families you couldn’t. And now she was looking at Pluto’s hand on Charon’s arm and wondering what it would feel like to have someone close enough to tell her that her eyes were changing color.
“Sedna.”
Pluto’s voice, close. Closer than she’d expected, because she’d been drifting and he’d moved in without tripping her awareness. Charon was behind him the way she always was.
“You haven’t rested.”
She opened her mouth to dismiss it. The words were right there (I don’t need rest, I’m fine, the heading requires constant correction) and then she looked at him and they stuck, because Pluto wasn’t trying to take over. He was just standing there with his gravity open, hazel-going-dark eyes steady, doing nothing more than noticing. And her sentinels hadn’t noticed.
Her gravity clenched around her own core.
She’d spent longer than she could count making sure nobody needed to look at her that closely, and having this half-stranger do it anyway made her want to look somewhere else.
“Gonggong can keep the count,” Pluto said. “Orcus can keep the heading. You need to rest at least a little.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, flannel-lined sleeves bunched at his wrists, too big for him. “Just to be safe?”
“Five intervals,” she said. “Five of Gonggong’s counts.”
Pluto’s mouth turned up at the corners. She didn’t let herself take in the specifics of it.
The formation’s edge was the farthest she could get from all of them without leaving, and she drifted there and let her focus go for the first time since Wise had ejected them, and the stars blurred and Sol vanished into the field. For five counts she floated and thought about the Sun, a star that had never spoken her name, out at the edge doing the work of paying attention.
She’d watched Planet X leave through her telescope and known what it meant. She’d summoned the sentinels and briefed them and prepared contingencies and tracked the route to the Kingdom and confronted Wise to his face (“What were you gossiping about with your little QUEEN?”) and been right about everything, every single assessment, and the Sun had never once looked at the Oort Cloud’s edge and thought: someone is keeping watch.
The Sun might look at nine dwarf planets showing up at his doorstep and see nothing but cosmic clutter.
She was going to find him anyway. (Stars above, she was petty.)
The Solar System had never noticed her. It wasn’t because it was the right thing to do. She was angry, had been angry for longer than she’d let herself admit. She was still going back to it.
She couldn’t let it go.
Stars, she was tired.
“Gong.” The fifth count.
Sedna opened her eyes and found Sol, brighter, perceptibly brighter, starting to separate itself from the background, and locked on.
“Status.”
“Heading’s good,” Orcus reported. “How far?”
“Gong gong gong,” Gonggong added, and Quaoar glanced at Makemake, who was sitting next to Gonggong with his notepad, and raised an eyebrow.
“‘Noticeably,’” Makemake translated, pushing his glasses up. Then he caught himself, and looked at Quaoar, and Quaoar looked back at him with an expression Sedna had never seen on him in all the years she’d known him.
She couldn’t name it. Quaoar probably couldn’t either.
“Stay with me,” she said, and pushed forward.
The Oort Cloud announced itself through her gravity.
A tug, distant and spread out, not the pull of one body but the collective haze of trillions of icy fragments scattered across a sphere one and a half light-years wide. Each one too small to matter. All of them together forming the outer edge, and Sedna had patrolled it for so long that feeling it in her field again was like hearing a frequency she’d been straining for without realizing her ears were searching.
She stopped, and the others stopped with her.
They didn’t stop in two groups.
Quaoar was beside Makemake, the two of them trading quiet observations about stellar drift in a mix of drawl and rapid-fire that had become, somewhere in the crossing, a single conversation. Orcus had drifted into Pluto’s gravity, and Pluto hadn’t flinched from it. Charon was next to Gonggong, humming something low while he counted along. Eris was near Sedna, hood down, present.
Haumea spun between them all, and Sedna still couldn’t figure out how he managed to keep the whole group together without trying. Pluto had told her what Haumea had said to him once, back in the Kuiper Belt. “I’m sorry the planets took you out of their club for being different.” Haumea just offered. (She envied that too, if she was counting. She was trying not to count.)
“That’s it,” Makemake whispered, glasses catching the Cloud’s dim scatter. “Isn’t it?”
Sedna felt it. The distribution. The density gradient. Sol’s pull, weak and present. She knew it the way she knew her own gravity.
“We’re home,” Pluto said, and the Southern accent had gone quiet and sure. Charon pressed into his side. Gonggong let out a long trembling “Goooong” that Sedna felt in her gravity before she heard it. Quaoar took the wheat stalk out of his mouth and just held it.
“Home,” Eris repeated, shoulders relaxing a fraction. “Joy.”
Sedna’s core ached.
Because the Oort Cloud was exactly where she’d left it, and it didn’t care that she’d been gone. But eight other people’s gravity was pressed up against hers and the whole thing felt different anyway, and Sedna couldn’t look at any of it head-on without her gravity doing something embarrassing.
(It hadn’t even been that long.)
“Gonggong,” she said, when she could. “Start a new count.”
“Gong,” he said, and grinned, the gap in his teeth catching the first edge of Sol’s light from one and a half light-years away.
Sedna set her heading inward.
She set the pace, and they kept up.